Teaching Public History

By Julia Brock and Evan Faulkenbury

The field of public history is growing as college and university history departments seek to recruit and retain students by emphasizing how studying the past can sharpen their skills and broaden their career options. But faculty have often sought to increase course offerings without knowing exactly what the teaching and practice of public history entails. Public historians have debated the meanings of public history since the 1970s, but as more students take public history courses and more scholars are tasked with teaching these classes, the lack of pedagogical literature specific to the field has been challenging. This book addresses the need for a practical guide to teaching public history now. In eleven essays by esteemed public historians teaching at colleges and universities across the United States, this volume details class meetings, student interactions, field trips, group projects, grading, and the larger aims of a course. Each essay contains wisdom and experience for how to teach a public history course and why such classes are vital for our students and communities.

Contributors include: Thomas Cauvin, Kristen Baldwin Deathridge, Jennifer Dickey, Torren Gatson, Abigail Gautreau, Romeo Guzman, Jim McGrath, Patricia Mooney-Melvin, Lindsey Passenger Wieck, and Rebecca S. Wingo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469673318

Book preview

Introduction

JULIA BROCK

EVAN FAULKENBURY

In the last two decades, scholars have written many books about public history, historical memory, museum studies, historic preservation, and allied fields, but few have focused on teaching public history. After public history emerged as a subfield within academia in the 1970s (typically referred to at the time as applied history), it remained a specialized category for the rest of the century, with few universities offering coursework. As a result, we now face a dearth of pedagogy on the teaching of public history, even at a time when courses are soaring in popularity within history departments. Public history courses in colleges and universities are in demand, not only because they reveal career options to students with a history degree but also because they teach marketable skills, such as web design, collaboration, problem-solving, audience engagement, focused research, and concise writing. Recently, public historians have authored practice-based textbooks, coinciding with the mission of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) to create best practice guides for graduate, undergraduate, and K–12 education.¹ There are also recent works that include reflection on pedagogy in digital public history practice and queer public history practice.² These textbooks are valuable, but we need more accounts of classroom instruction. All the while, colleges and universities are adding more public history courses, with over two hundred institutions now offering graduate and undergraduate options.³

This volume is a collection of eleven first-person essays that go behind the scenes to explore a full college semester inside public history courses. The authors share their journeys of teaching public history, including reflections on their thought processes, class preparation, course sessions, interactions with students, assignments, evaluations, student projects, and community partner relationships. These are reflective essays that admit successes and failures. Instead of offering the reader unsolicited advice, authors recount what they did and why. Teaching can be exhilarating, stressful, and at times lonely, and public history courses are no exception. These essays provide entry into the mindset of public historians who are teaching, struggling, and making mistakes, but also finding inspiration in their students and the public history classroom. We hope that educators, in reading these narratives, will find encouragement, pedagogical strategies, bold ideas, and renewed confidence in their own abilities.⁴

What exactly is public history? Few other fields exist within the historical profession that have so often debated definition. Practitioners agree that the term refers to public-facing history (rather than history written for academic audiences)—whether the outcomes might be museum exhibits, oral history projects, historic landmarks, walking tours, monuments, and so on—but the problem of definition remains. The NCPH offers a broad summary: Public history describes the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world. In this sense, it is history that is applied to real-world issues.⁵ Rather than debate what does or does not count, Alexandra M. Lord recently urged the NCPH and its members to broaden the definition of public history itself.⁶ Similarly, Jennifer Dickey (a contributor to this volume) imagines public history as a big tent, encompassing numerous forms of community-facing history.⁷ We offer this collection to help get to the heart of public history practice. As public history educators, we continually push the boundaries of our practice by what we accomplish with our students. The range of avenues by which we communicate and co-create history with general audiences means that our practice is ever-evolving and expanding. It is not insignificant, too, that we do so within the context of twenty-first century universities and colleges, which present institutional and structural possibilities and limitations. As each of these essayists demonstrates, public history is not a static field but one that we as educators shape through our methods of training.⁸

By reflecting on a semester in the classroom, the historians in this collection showcase the value of public history, though not without critical reflection on practice. Public history students can hone skills they do not necessarily receive in traditional history courses, such as working on a team, translating historical research for public consumption, considering audience responses, problem-solving for a partner, and building a public-facing project that lasts beyond the semester. Classroom work that goes off-campus comes with risk for both the instructor and students, but these essays illustrate that students find productive challenges, increase their capacity for empathy, and learn firsthand that public history, in its ideal form, is about service and conscientious application of historical skills. And for the wider community, the value of public history at a local college or university is that programs and courses can offer support to groups that are already sharing and preserving the nearby past. Public history is not insular but instead can reach beyond campus to build careful connections with community partners. Teaching public history, then, is not only about the students but also about supporting community members, however defined, and fostering a shared appreciation for local and regional histories, lifeways, and cultures.

These characteristics differentiate public history pedagogy from that explored in service learning and community engagement (SLCE) literature. There is common ground, to be sure, and the educator who embarks on a public history project may find helpful resources and support in institutional service learning programs. But generally, service learning is focused foremost on student needs—credits, credentials, and development—and, as some critics charge, outputs instead of outcomes that show the impact of engagement.⁹ SLCE literature, by and large, focuses on the non-humanities fields, such as education, public health, and STEM; two historians who note the gap suggest that it is indicative of a lingering question in SLCE: What relevance or worth does the study of the humanities have in the world outside the academy?¹⁰ Though public history educators are devoted to student support and development, we are practicing the principles and ethics defined by a wider field, one that finds space beyond institutions of higher education. Our standards require us, for example, to incorporate reflective practice, coauthorship and collaboration, and multivocal historical production. We apply these practices to the classroom rather than draw solely from the pedagogy of higher education.

Though we share common issues with engaged curriculum in other fields, public historians face unique challenges in the classroom. With the often tense relationship between town and gown, the expectations of a shared authority, and the goals that necessitate that student work be made accessible to audiences and stakeholders beyond the classroom, public history asks more of its students and teachers than do typical humanities courses. Students in a public history course have their work judged not only by the professor but also by the larger community, a situation that can create additional anxiety for both students and teachers. The stakes are high in public history courses as professors risk their professional and community reputations on how well they prepare their students to research, empathize, and make connections between the past and the present. Many of us, no doubt, put too much pressure on ourselves to meet everyone’s expectations, but this often understated reality of public history pedagogy persists. With this volume, we spotlight these exceptional challenges within our field and share ideas for how to better manage our semesters without cracking before finals week.

At the same time, we envision these essays to be useful to educators within other humanities disciplines. Adjacent fields to public history, such as museum studies, historic preservation, and library science, may find this volume particularly useful. Practitioners in other areas, from anthropology to urban planning, may also discover helpful strategies. A common thread that connects public history to a variety of other fields is its commitment to pushing past the boundaries of academia. Public history exists to make the past useful to general audiences, similarly to how a related field, archival studies, strives to connect collections with people beyond their climate-controlled walls.

This volume points toward a collective vision for the future of historical study as action oriented. More than ever before, history departments are looking to public history to bolster a more traditional curriculum, which means that public history will push departments to increasingly embrace community-facing historical work. NCPH and practitioners have long understood the relationship between history and community service, and as public history continues its rise in popularity within departments, students will come to appreciate, even demand, this connection as part of their basic historical training. The educators in this volume signal that public history is on the cusp of becoming a major field within the profession, not just a subfield. This service-based approach to historical inquiry should be welcome news to students, professors, departments, and public historians alike. In a political and cultural landscape where facts and evidence can be so easily dismissed, public history can offer an inclusive, community-focused platform to explore how and why the past shapes the present. By arguing why these classes matter for our students and our communities, we are also making the case for increased resources and institutional support. As professors in public history, we are laying a foundation for an action-oriented study of history.

Public history exists beyond the confines of a college classroom. How, then, should educators teach public history in a semester-long course on campus? In this collection, the authors explore this contrast by placing themselves as the bridge between classroom instruction and public history beyond academe. The field of public history situates itself between the worlds of academia and community-based practice. Within academia, some historians have perceived public history as trivial and non-scholarly (although this prejudice is dissipating as public history courses become more common within departments). At the same time, nonacademics who work as public historians through nonprofits, government services, or private organizations sometimes view the scholarly world of public history as too theory-laden and impractical for general audiences. These essays traverse the gap, demonstrating how college courses in public history can meaningfully engage with local communities beyond campus and, at the same time, ground students in the fundamentals of public history.

Educators with different backgrounds will glean unique insights from this collection. Veteran public history instructors may imagine new possibilities for their courses after reading through their peers’ accounts. Historians who have not formally trained in public history yet include public history activities or projects within their semester will benefit from these stories. Department chairs and administrators should find these perspectives illuminating, perhaps enabling them to better understand the support needed to launch a public history program. But those who stand the most to gain are new teachers, just beginning to wade into the world of public history. Historians may be unfamiliar with public history pedagogy and yet may find themselves tasked with teaching such a course to accommodate departmental needs. Graduate students in the job market may not have had the opportunity to teach a public history course, but perhaps a job advertisement prefers candidates with knowledge of public or digital history methods. As more and more departments add public history coursework, fewer and fewer public history scholars will be left to fill the demand. Thus, this book acts as a primer for anyone about to teach their first public history class. This volume is not a replacement for an advanced degree in public history theory and methodology, but it is a jump start that can quickly and efficiently prepare an instructor to lead a class of students forward.

Themes that emerge across these eleven essays will guide new educators in constructing their courses. Many of the authors, for example, recognize the ways that institutional structures define the possibilities of the public history classroom. The semester is an arbitrary unit of time for community partners, whose needs can go beyond fifteen weeks. Institutional funding (or lack thereof) shapes travel, research, and production, and can bolster or stymie off-campus work. Partnerships with community organizations can be challenged by differing expectations and lack of trust, and public history instructors must carefully labor to sustain ethical and reciprocal relationships. Within the classroom, instructors work to offer a comprehensive introduction to public history in readings and assignments, while also meeting project needs and maintaining a commitment to a pedagogy that reflects the ethics of the field—a sometimes heavy load for the public historians herein. Instructors must face the reality, too, that student effort alone cannot meet project needs and that sometimes there will be work to be done at the end of the semester to bridge the gap between student production and a final, polished project. In addition, several of these writers were deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and some explicitly address its impact on their teaching and course projects. In all, the experiences of contributing authors suggest what resources and strategies are required for the public history class: departmental support for class field trips or class projects, planning with community partners well in advance of the semester, and scaffolding student work so that students can blend principles with practice by the end of the semester.

The volume begins with insight from a longtime public history educator and ends with a reflection on the head-spinning shifts required for instruction during the pandemic. The first essay is by Patricia Mooney-Melvin, an associate professor of history and graduate program director at Loyola University Chicago. Her argument is clear from the start: Reflective practice represents public history’s signature pedagogy, which distinguishes it from other curricular design and course structures in the field of history. Before going through her fall 2019 graduate course Public History: Method and Theory, Mooney-Melvin explores the historiography of public history and teaching practice from the late 1970s onward. As a longtime leader within the field and the NCPH, Mooney-Melvin provides a contextual overview of public history education. Connecting this long history to her fall 2019 semester, she explains her department’s relationship with the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society and the class project. She then leads readers through a week-by-week appraisal of class sessions, readings, and goals through the end of the semester. Mooney-Melvin concludes by reemphasizing what she means by reflective practice and how, even if students do not always understand it in the moment, they internalize these lessons as they move through Loyola’s graduate program in public history and into their careers.

Next, Lindsey Passenger Wieck and Rebecca S. Wingo recorded and edited a conversation they shared about their ongoing syllabus swap. Wieck, an associate professor of history at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, and Wingo, an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, both direct public history programs but struggle with impostor syndrome for not having formally trained in public history. After becoming friends during graduate school, they continued to rely on each other as public history professors and directors in an innovative syllabus swap in which they exchanged syllabi for their introduction to public history courses. According to Wieck and Wingo, the swap happens with the understanding that the other will improve the readings and assignments before returning it. With this swap, we essentially double the speed with which we can improve our syllabi and, by proxy, our students’ experience. We’re basically the backwoods backpackers of academia: packing out the other person’s rubbish to leave the syllabus better than we found it. They offer a lively account of the public history syllabus as a collaborative and intellectual undertaking.

Halfway through Evan Faulkenbury’s fall 2019 introduction to public history course, he shifted gears and began emphasizing students’ Big Picture Goals. Faulkenbury is an associate professor of history at SUNY Cortland who teaches the public history class that all history majors must take to graduate. In addition to surveying public history’s multiple formats, such as museums, historic sites, and oral histories, Faulkenbury facilitated a partnership between his class, the Cortland County Historical Society, and the local tourism bureau. Their joint project used the digital platform Clio to create entries on fifty of Cortland County’s roadside historic markers. As the project began, Faulkenbury began shifting the purpose of his class to focus on everyone’s Big Picture Goals. Having just read a book about teaching, Faulkenbury started devoting time every class session to stressing how the information they were processing about public history and the skills they were developing through their project could help students achieve their personal career goals. Faulkenbury was surprised to see how this pedagogical strategy opened his students’ eyes to seeing public history not only as a subject to be studied but as something relevant to their own lives and potential futures. The project itself concluded with both successes and failures, but the larger goal of making students aware of how public history can be a vehicle for accomplishing their own professional goals transformed the class in a positive way. The point of teaching public history to undergraduates should not necessarily be to introduce them to public history as a career path but to expose them to the skills of public history that can translate into any vocation. Remarkably, Faulkenbury discovered, Public history … does this almost intrinsically, but professors have to be the ones to help students see the forest through the trees.

Torren Gatson, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, commits his public history courses to exploring and advancing inclusivity and equity in the public history field. In the fall of 2019, he taught a museum and historic site interpretation course in which he and students partnered with the Historic Magnolia House, a hotel that was included in The Negro Motorist Green Book and played a central part in the civil rights struggle in Greensboro. Gatson, an African American scholar and public historian, led a class of predominantly white students through uncomfortable discussions to help connect their rhetorical commitments to inclusivity to an applied practice via the work of community partnership and exhibit building. Gatson facilitated his course as an exercise in scholarly consciousness raising; in his words, students left the course with an awareness of issues of authority and culturally responsive pedagogy, as well as an awareness of white privilege and tearing down barriers within museums, which allows for professionals to begin dismantling colonized spaces toward a more inclusive narrative. Awareness, he contends, is only a beginning but a necessary one as students move into their professional lives in a field that is only now confronting long-standing issues of inequity.

Jim McGrath considers public history pedagogy in the context of digital restorative justice work. With scholar Monica Muñoz Martinez, McGrath co-taught a Mapping Violence course for undergraduates at Brown University in the spring of 2020. McGrath, now a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University, underlines his essay with a question he and Martinez grappled with in the course: How do we teach and reckon with long histories of state-sanctioned racial violence in the United States with students and with publics beyond the classroom? Instructors and students worked on the Mapping Violence digital public history project begun by Martinez as an extension of her scholarship on racial violence in Texas between 1900 and 1930. McGrath and Martinez intentionally framed the course for students who were not enrolled in public history or public humanities certificates, and throughout the course of the semester, they worked to build a database of incidents of racial violence. In reflecting on the semester, McGrath notes that public history instructors must reflect on how these pasts [of racial violence] and our relationships to them impact our pedagogical approaches in the present. Humanities instructors who work with data and archives in any context should think carefully about how their readings, lessons, and assignments acknowledge the colonial and violent legacies of data collection and the creation of archives. The course he and Martinez built charts a path for public historians engaging with the violent legacies we inherit and intentionally or unintentionally perpetuate.

Abigail Gautreau, an assistant professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, kept a daily journal of her class sessions for her winter/spring 2020 public history course. This record of her thought process is invaluable, as it allows readers to feel her emotions day by day in the course. Gautreau’s writing is honest as she recounts what went well, what bombed, and the quotidian drudgery of actually managing a class. She pulls aside the curtain to allow readers to experience the hard labor of teaching public history, balancing her public history course load with two other classes on a multisite campus. Her class partnered with the Lowell Area Historical Museum for a project, but the COVID-19 pandemic cut their collaboration short. Up until that point, however, Gautreau led class sessions on historic preservation, the National Register, archives, and more, and took field trips to local museums. Gautreau’s in-depth analysis of these class discussions reveals the difficulty in translating public history topics for student consideration, how they can easily go wrong, but also how they hold tremendous potential for opening students’ eyes to the power of public history. Even when class sessions did not always pan out as she hoped, teaching this public history class more often than not rejuvenated Gautreau during a trying semester. As Gautreau writes, What I really want to share … is that so often I leave my public history class with more energy than when I walked in. It’s a special feeling, because I don’t always feel that way when I leave class.

Romeo Guzmán, an assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate University, writes in the style of creative nonfiction to illustrate how fútbol (soccer) enabled his students to become working public historians. While working as an assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, Guzmán taught Fútbol: A Local and Global History of the Beautiful Game during the spring semesters of 2018, 2019, and 2020. In his essay, Guzmán explores his own evolution as a public historian, followed by a detailed map of his course. He then shares how he and his students became part of a special movement to celebrate fútbol through a local professional club in Fresno while using the tools of public history to involve the community in their own regional history. The benefits of such an involved multi-semester project, according to Guzmán, allowed us to have fun, to enjoy fútbol, and to engage an eager public. It also granted us a lot of credibility with the Central Valley soccer community and made it easier for me to pitch the significance of public history to my students and university. By designing trading cards, staffing tables, organizing events, printing T-shirts, attending games, and playing fútbol, Guzmán engineered a comprehensive public history project that, while not without its challenges, succeeded in bringing together the larger Fresno community.

Compressing an introduction to public history course from a traditional semester into just seven weeks is nothing new to Jennifer Dickey, a professor of history and coordinator of the public history program at Kennesaw State University. In this thoughtful and introspective essay, Dickey reports on the accomplishments of her fall 2019 class, which partnered with an old railroad depot in the nearby town of Tate, Georgia, to conduct research and propose exhibit panels. Knowing she was working with students just learning about public history (and in a seven-week course, no less), Dickey had no illusions about expecting too much, but she considers her ambitious schedule as a positive for her class. Dickey acknowledges that her philosophy is that even if the students cannot complete a project that is ready for prime time, I am teaching them the process. Doing public history work is collaborative and iterative, and it is something that may take them years to master. My classes are the beginning of that process. Week by week, Dickey leads readers through her thought process, decision-making, and evaluation of students. Dickey reveals what worked and what did not, and considers how throwing students into public history headfirst has many more pros than cons.

Julia Brock outlines what she calls her all-in approach to the introduction to public history classroom, which, like similar courses discussed in the collection, includes seminar-style reading and discussion, visits by practitioners, field trips, and a final applied project. She also considers how public history teaching and practice are shaped by the institutions in which we teach, and what’s at stake in extending the university beyond the university.¹¹ She reflects on three ways that she asked students to engage with the power dynamics of the classroom and field in the fall of 2019: through examination of campus history, interrogation of the policies and practices that define what from the past is preserved, and a class project framed by the changing ethics of the field. The class partnered with the Old Cahawba Archaeological Park near Selma, Alabama, where students researched Reconstruction-era Black life in the former capital of Alabama. Brock concluded that the work outside the classroom was especially important in situating students in ethical practice, even as she acknowledges the limits of an intensive all-in course model.

Public history can verge on the whimsical. Thomas Cauvin embraces public history’s weirdness in his essay about his students creating wall panels for public restrooms. Cauvin, an associate professor of public history at the University of Luxembourg, writes about teaching an undergraduate Practices of Public History course at Colorado State University during the fall 2019 semester. The first portion of the course centered around defining public history, overviewing topics, and listening to guest speakers. Then, Cauvin explains, he guided his students into two public history projects. Two separate projects may seem overly ambitious, but according to Cauvin, My goal is for my students to leave the class not only with new knowledge and skills but also with something more concrete that they can show, share, discuss, and be proud of. One project involved a collaboration with the campus radio station creating short podcasts about the history of the university. The second required students to design wall panels about the history of Fort Collins and approach businesses around town to ask permission to mount panels in their restrooms. Due to the special—some would say strange—location, Cauvin writes, students had to be very careful and thoughtful about the contents and design. It also forced them to work outside their comfort zone, as they would be engaging with a specific but anonymous public. Cauvin explores the challenges of teaching public history, noting the importance of hardship (both for the professor and the students) to create worthwhile public history projects that last beyond the semester.

In this volume’s sole essay on an online semester deep into the COVID-19 pandemic, Kristen Baldwin Deathridge, an associate professor of history at Appalachian State University, ungraded her spring 2021 introduction to digital history course. Deathridge guides readers through her semester in diary entries, written in present tense just after each class session ended. Jotting down her thoughts in the moment allowed Deathridge to record thoughtful observations about class sessions, Zoom calls, student progress, and the act of teaching public history through a screen. Due to the challenges of the pandemic and teaching online, Deathridge helped students create individual websites and digital projects rather than group work. She assesses the positives and negatives of this approach, and she considers the relationship between public history and digital history. To evaluate her students’ work, Deathridge followed an ungrading pedagogical model that allowed her students to progress at their own pace, write critical self-examinations of their work, and shape their digital history projects in styles unburdened by traditional grading methods. Deathridge found this approach to be useful, though not without its challenges, writing at the start of the semester, It is a bit scary … if I’m honest. But I think that allowing students to estimate their own grade for the class will help them to take ownership of their part of the work required for learning, which is an essential skill for both public and digital history.

As we enter into the twenty-first century’s third decade, public history’s rise within both academia and communities is unprecedented. Through our teaching, we will not only facilitate this ascent but also shape public history’s usefulness to our students, departments, and local areas. Public history is about action—doing history out in the world. Through these eleven essays, we hope our passion for and critical assessment of public history enlightens those educators entering the public history classroom.

Notes

1. To see the NCPH’s set of educational guides, visit the For Public History Educators webpage, https://ncph.org/publications-resources/educators. Public history textbooks include Cauvin, Public History; Lyon, Nix, and Shrum, Introduction to Public History. Related works include Kean and Martin, The Public History Reader; Gardner and Hamilton, Oxford Handbook of Public History; Sayer, Public History; Wingo, Heppler, and Schadewald, Digital Community Engagement; Smulyan, Doing Public Humanities.

2. See Wingo, Heppler, and Schadewald, Digital Community Engagement; Rosenthal, Living Queer History; Stein, Queer Public History.

3. See the complete list on the NCPH’s guide to public history programs at https://ncph.org/program-guide/.

4. The only other comprehensive set of essays that focused on the teaching of public history was published in 1987. See the twelve essays in Johnson and Stowe, Field of Public History.

5. See How Do We Define Public History? National Council on Public History, https://ncph.org/what-is-public-history/about-the-field/.

6. Lord, Finding Connections, 11.

7. Dickey, Public History and the Big Tent Theory.

8. For a brief historiography of public history’s definitions and meanings, see Kelley, Public History; Grele, Whose Public? Whose History?; Achenbaum, Public History’s Past, Present, and Prospects; Frisch, A Shared Authority; Appleby, Should We All Become Public Historians?; Liddington, What Is Public History?; Stanton, What Is Public History? Redux; Weible, Defining Public History; Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks; Gardner and Hamilton, Oxford Handbook of Public History, introduction. For more complete bibliographies of public history’s origins, meanings, and historiography, see Cauvin, Public History, 22–25; Gardner and Hamilton, Oxford Handbook of Public History, 19–22.

9. Stoecker, Liberating Service Learning.

10. Straus and Eckenrode, Engaging Past and Present, 255. Historians have argued for the importance of history in service-learning curriculum; see Donovan and Harkavy, Connecting Past and Present.

11. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 37.

1 Reflective Practice

Public History’s Signature Pedagogy, Course Design, and Student Engagement

PATRICIA MOONEY-MELVIN

Although training and practice in what has increasingly fallen under the general designation of public history predates the use of the term public history, the inauguration of The Public Historian in 1978 stimulated vigorous discussion about the ways that history works in the world outside the academy and the nature of graduate training in history. Whereas traditional training in history emphasized the discipline, public history training demanded the integration of theory, knowledge, and praxis in ways that contemporary programs did not address but were believed necessary to produce the new type of professional person G. Wesley Johnson called for in the inaugural issue of The Public Historian.¹ What was needed, a group of public history educators agreed, were new ways of thinking about graduate history education—overall curricular design as well as individual course structure—to meet the needs of students enrolled in public history courses or programs. Reflective practice emerged as a conceptual approach that offered a strong curricular foundation for students, enabling them to integrate disciplinary knowledge and reflection-in-action, which, as Noel Stowe argued,

"prepare[s]

graduates in applied practice and conceptual approaches appropriate to the types of questions asked of practitioners and to the settings of their practice."² Reflective practice, I contend, is public history’s signature pedagogy. At Loyola University Chicago, students are introduced to this approach in History 480, Public History: Method and Theory, the first course put in place when Loyola’s public history program opened in 1980. The ability of students to appreciate by the end of the semester the tie between disciplinary training and reflection-in-action—the two basic components of reflective practice—varies. Some students get the dynamic among disciplinary knowledge and its ways of thinking, skills, and dispositions and reflection-in-action by the end of the course, while others leave the course tied to reflection-in-action rather than reflective practice, only to internalize it by the end of their master’s or doctoral program, demonstrating their understanding in their public history oral examination.

This chapter explores the integration of reflective practice into History 480, with an emphasis on the fall 2019 course. Additional insights are drawn from the significant reworking of two sessions in 2020 as well as from the reflections of students enrolled in the course from fall 2014 through fall 2019. Why reflective practice? Early public history educators believed in the necessity of a distinctive organizing structure that integrated practice, theory, and execution to guide both individual course design and training structure.

Finding a Signature Pedagogy

The formal inauguration of public history as an element of the graduate history landscape found program directors wrestling with the challenge of designing both the curriculum and individual courses. Those of us involved in the formative years of the 1980s grappled with how to balance historical training and understanding with application. We wanted not only to introduce students to the notion of transferable skills, as well as a range of venues where such skills could be applied, but also to train students as historians in order to integrate their education in historical thinking, content, and methodology with projects that took them beyond the more familiar confines of the graduate seminar and history classroom. We also searched for a language that best described as well as shaped this form of